“... are problems with all this. In a vigorous essay called ‘Inside and Outside History’, the poet Anne Stevenson challenged Boland’s claim that she lacks female precursors, and suggested that her sense of isolation is encouraging feminist correctness at the expense of ‘fire or flair’. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill knocked holes in Stevenson’s account of Gaelic ...”

“... seemingly innocuous details, such as the name of her mother or father or the town in which she was born. This is in keeping with Kristóf’s fiction, which never identifies its setting and often features unnamed characters. The many interviews Kristóf gave help to fill in some of the gaps, but even in these she is laconic, her answers sometimes no more than ...”

“... The ‘philosophy of desire’ was born in 1969, Serge Gainsbourg’s année érotique, when the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari met the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Today, it’s hard to imagine them not knowing each other, and easy to forget how unlikely their partnership was. François Dosse begins his biography of the two men with their first encounter, a year after the ‘events’ of 1968, which, more than anything, inspired their collaboration ...”

“... a missed opportunity: much of this work has yet to be recast for a general reader.Catherine was born in Portugal on 25 November 1638, St Catherine’s Day. Her home was the vast Vila Viçosa, set among olive groves in Alentejo, outside Lisbon. She was the fourth child of João, duke of Braganza, and Luisa de Guzmán, from the house of Medina Sidonia, one of ...”

“... will believe almost anything else: that Thomas More was a martyr for freedom of conscience, that Anne Boleyn was a witch, and that the monasteries were dissolved by men on horseback who rode in mob-handed and decapitated monks with battle-axes. It is a long time now since triumphalist Protestantism held sway, either in academic or popular belief. Among ...”

“... said that our characters are made by the ten years immediately preceding our birth. The poet was born in 1564; five years earlier, in 1559, the Act of Uniformity was passed (though only barely, by three votes). The previous half-century was not strong in uniformity. Major historical studies of the Reformation period, like Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the ...”

“... its particles entangled over vast stretches of space. And vast stretches of time. A generation born in the 1930s can easily have living grandchildren who might survive to see the 22nd century. That’s 170 years; and the grown-up children in The Corrections find themselves, as so many do, smack in the centre of this temporal expanse, approaching middle age ...”

“... above all Alfonso Chacón, Pompeo Ugonio, the Fleming Philips van Winghe and the Maltese-born Antonio Bosio – set out to study the catacombs systematically. It was a huge and inaccessible site: there are sixty separate catacombs, though only thirty or so were known before recent times. They comprised a vast and wildly complex network of passages ...”

“... the anxious conformities of the Cape Town Jewish community into which she and other others were born. Their clannishness only intensified by apartheid, the elders of the tribe devoted themselves to perpetuating the group through marriage and child-rearing, ritualistically affirming their collective identity with lavish bar mitzvahs and weddings. ‘You ...”

“... Longley has described himself as ‘a mutant Irishman’ on the grounds that, though he was born and brought up in Belfast, his parents were both English. He therefore grew up (as I did) in a puzzling Irish/British city which lacked a ‘familial hinterland’. This partly explains the double-minded uncertainties of While I, hands in my ...”

“... one with ‘no contact with the real world at all’, as Frank O’Connor disparagingly put it. Born in New Zealand, she spent all her time in London and Germany and France just getting by, struggling with lack of money and poor health, writing in beds and bedsits, out of suitcases and in overnight hotels and all the time imagining a kind of writing that ...”

“... dates: the Mona Lisa, another female portrait, La Belle Ferronnière, Virgin and Child with St Anne, the first version of Virgin of the Rocks and St John the Baptist. A new insight into his activity was provided by the publication in 1651 of his so-called Treatise on Painting, a work produced after his death by combining different passages from his ...”

“... that still roils. Lish’s pedagogical manner, however, was the opposite of his surgical style. A born showman and provocateur, he presided over workshops and private master-classes that lasted for hours, often with limited bathroom breaks. It wasn’t the practical advice and forked-lightning insights that made the tuition fees and bladder discomfort worth ...”

“... affluent working class’. Between Aldbury, the picturesque but poor village where Landemare was born in 1882, the local market town of Tring and the backwater of Aston Clinton where she grew up, families like the Youngs were held in the orbit of the local landowners, who included the Flowers, the Harcourts (for whom her grandfather was a ...”

“... East would soon end. A week before her fifteenth birthday, after hearing about the D-Day attacks, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that ‘hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.’ But as spring turned to summer, it became clear that the Allied landings wouldn’t stop the hunt for Jews in Western Europe. On the ...”